It's a non-change from live. Health pools are doubled and healing is increased by 50% (relative to damage output), so anything that heals as a fraction of maximum health needs to be reduced by 25% to keep its relative power unchanged.

It should be noted that with the new healing design change that these frequent overhealing spells (Leader of the Pack, Ysera's Gift) are going to be buffed kinda massively in their effective healing. When I saw the health pool change one of my first thoughts was "now leader of the pack might be relevant."

On a side note, I have been neglecting these forums for about a month or so (end of the tier been playing Diablo/Dota not enough WoW) its good to see how much stuff you guys have been compiling for next expansion . Not sure if I am staying feral yet (Guild needs a new tank might be going guardian who knows!)

Stenhaldi wrote:It's a non-change from live. Health pools are doubled and healing is increased by 50% (relative to damage output), so anything that heals as a fraction of maximum health needs to be reduced by 25% to keep its relative power unchanged.

Other druid changes that are "non-changes" in this sense:

Renewal 30% -> 22%

Ysera's Gift 5% -> 4%

Nature's Vigil damage to healing 25% -> 35%

Nature's Vigil healing to damage 25% -> 16%

Glyph of Ferocious Bite 2% -> 1.5%

Gotcha, I didn't realize they weren't thorough in the first pass through (how foolish of me!).

In other news, the new patch notes today didn't include much new if you've been following social media and such carefully, but here's a couple things of interest that are mostly inconsequential or you might not have otherwise already known about:

Armor and Spirit will be specific to tanks and healers respectively, but all other secondary stats will have universal appeal.Hit and Expertise on all items have been replaced with a universally useful secondary stat.Mail and Leather Armor pieces will always have Agility and Intellect on it.

If you're crazy like me, this means you should be good to start collecting any leather int gear that doesn't have spirit on it for 6.0, as it will be usable for feral.

Previously, multiple movement speed modifiers on you were multiplicative, meaning that if you had two different +25% movement speed bonuses, they resulted in a total movement speed of 56% (1.25*1.25 = 1.56).

Movement speed bonuses have been changed to be additive. The previous example with two different +25% movement speed bonuses would result in a total movement speed of +50%. The logic governing which bonuses stack with others has been simplified as well.

If a bonus is self-only and passive, it now stacks additively with everything.If a bonus is temporary or applies to other players, it's considered exclusive, and the character only gains the benefit of the highest exclusive bonus.

Additionally, restrictions that prevented a player with a temporary speed bonus from receiving or activating a second temporary speed bonus have been removed. Both bonuses will now apply to the character, but only the one with the highest magnitude will have any effect.

This was stated in the Final Boss episode 2 weeks ago, but it does effect us a bit so it bears repeating. For the most part this is a small nerf to how fast we move simply from the demotion from multiplicative scaling to additive, but otherwise a nice change to simplify things. Hopefully this will mean we'll get the full effect from Stampeding Roar again since (I think) it hasn't stacked with Cat Form for a couple patches now.

Periodic damage and healing effects now dynamically recalculate their damage, healing, Critical chance, multipliers, and period on every tick.

Recasting periodic damage over time and healing over time effects that are already on the target now extends those effects to up to 130% of the normal duration of the effect.

Also something that had been mentioned a couple times but it's nice to see its in the patch notes so we know they're going through with it. Barring any changes to our bleed durations, that puts Rip refreshes at 4.8 seconds and below and Rake/Thrash at 4.5 seconds.

Glyph of Stampede has been removed. Its effects have been merged into Glyph of Stampeding Roar.

Huzzah! Took them long enough to figure this out. Die glyph bloat die, muahahah!

It's still unclear (at least to me) whether the "free refresh" period depends on the duration of the old bleed (which gets extended by shred) or the duration of the new bleed (which is always 16 seconds).

I'd guess it's the latter, though, just because the UI doesn't really track the former properly.

Stenhaldi wrote:It's still unclear (at least to me) whether the "free refresh" period depends on the duration of the old bleed (which gets extended by shred) or the duration of the new bleed (which is always 16 seconds).

I'd guess it's the latter, though, just because the UI doesn't really track the former properly.

New bleed. It extends to up to 130% of the duration. The duration of Rip is 16 seconds on application, which is when all this math is done. 16 * 1.3 = 20.8 So if you refresh it with >= 4.8 seconds remaining, it becomes 20.8. If you refresh it with < 4.8 seconds remaining, it becomes 16 + remaining

aggixx wrote:I highly doubt you can find a source of them saying that they were going to remove all raid CDs from DPS. They've always said they were interested in toning down the strength and availability of raid cooldowns, which is exactly what they have done: Classes that had several now only have one (or none, if they had enough utility in other departments), cooldown strength was brought down to be lower that healers' cooldowns, and classes that brought zero raid utility (Mages) were granted one.

The exact line was "Healer Strength" cooldowns. Exactly how do you qualify that when comparing healing vs damage reduction? It's completely dependent on the amount of damage. Healiocentric did a comparison and HotW tranq came in behind several damage reduction CDs depending on the encounter. Since they are doubling health in WoD, the classes that got their raid CD cut in half will in essence be exactly the same.

Can the point of Savagery be precisely that it doesn't offer something interesting? Take a look at the comments on Wowhead's calculator. Every comment about Savage Roar is negative (some of the pre-Alpha comments use the talent's older name, Might of Malorne). Yes, contented parties don't speak up, but there is clearly a segment of players who enjoy the spec and want it simpler. That the few of us, here on a small fansite, with histories covering the best part of a decade, will possibly never choose the talent has little bearing on whether the talent is a good design. Design serves a much larger audience.

I believe you misunderstood what I was saying. I was giving feedback on Aggixx's suggestion about making Savage Roar baseline and having the Savagery talent give SR back.

I agree that just because some people don't like something doesn't mean it's a bad design. I would also say that just because there is something so good everyone takes it is good design either. Take the Cat Form glyph. Everyone uses it because the bonus is too good not to take. However it's a terrible glyph design that GC acknowledged didn't work. In the end Savagery is a poorly designed talent. It's a trap that will suck in people who don't like SR. There seems to be a misconception that it will free up combo points to do so much more damage and that isn't the case. So ya a talent that gives an incorrect perception to people is a poorly designed one.

I think some of the problem is that Savage Roar is a boring design. It does make the rotation more challenging, but no one is excited to cast it because the effect is uninteresting. That I think is what causes the perception issue that Savagery is hiding behind. It is harder, but it never feels like a pay off to push it, so when you do it wrong it only feels like a penalty. Now the big old buffed Rip I cast when I get that perfect timing of both trinkets and a TF that is exciting to push.

Pie in the sky I would find something for SR to do to make people feel good about pushing it. However I don't think that Ferals are on the table for a full redesign that it would likely take. So I am trying to be realistic in what the design is likely to be and try to focus on the stuff I think I have the best shot at changing through feedback. I love playing Feral. We aren't perfect but it's still my favorite spec and I will keep playing it, and I will try to keep making it better.

Make Ferocious Bite do real damage and then managing Savage Roar will become real interesting.

teddabear wrote:Make Ferocious Bite do real damage and then managing Savage Roar will become real interesting.

I disagree. You could double triple or quadruple Ferocious Bite's damage and as long it still does less damage than Rip it will not have a significant impact on our rotation. Savage Roar management would be the exact same regardless of how hard it hits; you would always want it up still. Ferocious Bite competes much more with Rip rotationally so the most significant change you would see is lower and lower threshold of how much time left on Rip you would bite at.

On top of that, I think the vast majority of people that dislike SR as mechanic would still dislike it just as much, if not more, if Ferocious Bite did more damage (as I said, maintenance style is the same).

It depends on gear, the amount of Ferocious Bites you can do changes greatly during an expansion. It wouldn't really be fun to have to wait for the last couple of tiers before the rotation got interesting so that would be a problem. What would be interesting is if they made a Crit/Ferocious Bite build semi-competitive with a Mastery/Bleed build. But then the PvP issue kicks in.

Ferocious Bite now does less base damage and scales more with AP.Shred now does 365% damage, up from 260%.Savagery - Savage Roar now also increases all Physical damage dealt by 45%.Rip now does ~2.5x more damage.

The savagery change is interesting since it seems to pretty clearly be an intended buff... which is a tad odd because the other two options were actually just as lackluster on a single target, barring any bugs in SimC (which is a distinct possibility) this would make Savagery the clear winner on single target, and probably for everything else except for aoe on like 4 mobs+.

The other changes are mostly just them balancing our damage breakdown a bit as without them currently autoattack would be a very high portion of our damage. I suspect the FB and Shred changes are entirely just compensating for the weapon damage and AP changes, but the Rip change seems like it might have a bit extra in there. My best guess is they put a bit more damage scaling into it to compensate for the lack of excessive snapshotting abuse that puts it where it is on live.

Yeah, the shred and ferocious bite changes just bring them back up to their 5.4 levels (after accounting for ap and weapon damage changes and the +20% perks). The rip change is a ~38% buff [edit: mistake, should be ~33%] from 5.4.

Rake is still ~50% weaker on alpha than in 5.4.

Last edited by Stenhaldi on Thu Apr 24, 2014 1:54 am, edited 2 times in total.

SimC is worthless right now. The data being pulled from the alpha servers is incorrect. Celestalon spent several tweets telling Hina that today. Stop running them till we actually get something half way real to work with.

Tinderhoof wrote:SimC is worthless right now. The data being pulled from the alpha servers is incorrect. Celestalon spent several tweets telling Hina that today. Stop running them till we actually get something half way real to work with.

Celestalon [email protected] · 5h @Hinalover "Not final" implies that it is at least in a draft state. That is not the case. Really.

It's not SimC's fault. Not all of the actual coefficents are actually in the alpha build. Because of this nothing SimC will actually mean anything.

Well I mean numbers could be manually input, probably too much for simc which is trying to be everything for everyone but catus could be modified to turn off snapshotting and it'd basically be ready (especially if he made a version where we can change coefficents from within the UI or script). I mean ultimately its not super important since they're not at the balance pass part yet but would be neat just to get a general idea.

Celestalon [email protected] · 5h @Hinalover "Not final" implies that it is at least in a draft state. That is not the case. Really.

It's not SimC's fault. Not all of the actual coefficents are actually in the alpha build. Because of this nothing SimC will actually mean anything.

Well I mean numbers could be manually input, probably too much for simc which is trying to be everything for everyone but catus could be modified to turn off snapshotting and it'd basically be ready (especially if he made a version where we can change coefficents from within the UI or script). I mean ultimately its not super important since they're not at the balance pass part yet but would be neat just to get a general idea.

What numbers would you manually put in? They don't exist as far as the public is concerned. The only numbers available are though datamining and they aren't valid. There isn't anything worth running yet.

Tinderhoof wrote:What numbers would you manually put in? They don't exist as far as the public is concerned. The only numbers available are though datamining and they aren't valid. There isn't anything worth running yet.

Me personally? I'd run with whatever current alpha values have been data mined/I could find. Had to pull from both WoWDB and WoWHead to get these but:

Rip = 93.75%AP/Tick from MMO-CRake = 70%AP/Tick from WoWHeadShred = 365%WD from MMO-CFerocious Bite = 178.5%AP from MMO-CThrash = 23.9%AP + 17.1%AP/Tick from WoWHead (probably a bit low)Swipe = 205%WD from WoWHead (though I would consider giveing it the same ~40% buff Shred received to keep it in line with current)Cat Moonfire = I'd probably make up my own values, perhaps with similar DPE as Rake =)

But then again, I like messing with numbers and I agree it probably wouldn't interest a lot of people and certainly shouldn't be considered as far as balancing concerns yet. Mostly would just be something to screw around with while we wait for beta to start. =)

Oh I was wrong about rake -- missed an earlier change to its coefficient. So after accounting for changes to attack power, weapon damage, crit chance, and the spell coefficients (including leveling perks), shred, rake, and ferocious bite are doing about the same damage as live. Ravage, swipe, and thrash are still too weak (40-50% weaker than live), but I imagine they're still in the "not even a draft" state. Rip is 30-40% stronger than live.

Making our special attacks do more damage relative to our auto-attacks is good imo.

Buffing SR is - well not so good. One of the effects of that change is to make bear-catting even less effective. That's too bad, since the change to Mythic raiding (with 20 man raids) to some degree negates the need to nerf bear-catting. However, it does align with the whole concept of having tanking and melee dps in two different druid specs.

Buffing Rip and Moonfire just makes us more dot-based. We'll probably still not be able to burst in WoD - but I wonder how much other classes' burst will go down?